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Dahami's Reptoids and Aliens

This is some old stuff I have. There are some acrylic paintings did in the nineties, and some scans of pencil sketches. In some instances I just used my old digital camera to photograph the art (not the best lighting). My scanner is hooked up to an old computer and its card uses an ISA slot, so I don't set it up very often. When I do maybe I'll put up some more recent work. A couple of the images were colored in Photoshop after scanning.

i think i'm pretty sure you have a passion for aliens and reptoids man, wonder where that might come from hehe

i like the fact some of these are creepy as fuck, but even if they are alien their paintings should still be subject to the rules of form and color theory...so imho they could use some more polishing in the basics of the actual painting and drawing stage
again, really creepy

It's a shame there isn't a bit more progression so far as the amount of work you put into your realism, but it's pretty obvious what you have a passion for and what style you like. Reminds me a lot of the illustrations in the UFO books I used to check out at my local library when I was a kid.

Thanks for commenting. For the most part I think I have the underlying shape and line work right. One thing that was difficult was trying to come up with a plausible scale pattern based in part on studying reference photos of terrestrial lizards, snakes and/or crocodilians. It required a lot of reworking the scales (the shapes and locations of which are defined by their edges) and was very time consuming. Gray aliens without discernible scales are much easier than reptilian aliens for that reason. There's a lot more that can be done with this, probably using a program like Photoshop or Painter for coloring and lighting effects. I have Photoshop CS3 but I haven't really felt like doing much with these images lately. I'm happy to show them, however.

Many of these are based on speaking with people who report having seen them. In the case of the reptilians, I usually can get some information about the color and general information about the scales ("bumpy like the skin on an iguana's neck" or "overlapping like snake scales" for example). In some cases people just describe the skin as "scaly like a lizard or snake." Few people recall many details about the exact scale pattern, however. The yellowish/khaki sort of reptilian with the breastplate and close-up portrait was an exception. I spent a couple hours with the witness doing a detailed sketch of the face, getting bone structure, scale size/pattern and making notes about coloration. I've always loved lizards and snakes (and dinosaurs), and I wish more of the Dungeons and Dragons and other fantasy representations of reptilian humanoids were done by people with a more obvious appreciation for reptilian scales.

Last edited by Dahami; November 24th, 2008 at 02:49 PM.
Reason: add more information

Some great designs - try paint some lizards, insects and stuff to help you with more form, structure and texture - you could take these very far! just keep pushing yourself! Im gonna hit up a museum soon, lots of animals and stuff to draw from!

NIce originality but just think how awsome they would be renderd correctly with light and colours applied in a studied and correct way! Colours reflect upon eachother, light is not just white, light sources make the aliens pop even more.
Push these and don't rely on them just being your style. A very nice start and a lot of work. So you actually talk to guys who have been visited? Ayn interesting infos you wanna share?

These images are essentially a study of the variations described by people who report UFO contact/abduction. It's almost all based on research I did in the nineties. For the past several years my spare time has been occupied by computer gaming more so than drawing or speaking to UFO experiencers. I invite anyone out there to use the information on anatomy, coloration and so forth contained in these images to create some alien portraits or scenes of your own. I don't own this research. It's a collaboration and anyone interested is free to participate. Perhaps if someone creates something that I find sufficiently inspiring, I'll even get back into it myself.

BullDawg Creative - I agree.

Abductee - Thanks.

AlexTooth - Not as far as I know, but then, abductees usually report that the memory is affected (i.e., missing time or only partial recollection for certain events).

kidult - Good ideas. I'd love to see you tackle some of these yourself.

StallionOfBeachhaven - Everyone reacts to the images differently. People have different feelings about the different species when they look at pictures of them. Amazingly funny is a good response. As valid as any other. Thanks.

DeeLock - Often the eyes are described as extremely large and somewhat almond-shaped. They seem to wrap around the side of the head more than human eyes. In the case of the insectoids (mantis types) they can be really enormous. Alien eyes, if the you could see them through the skin and the skull, might not be so nearly spherical as human eyes. As for style, my goal has been to try to keep stylistic influence to a minimum and try to document what the witnesses have reported to me. When I have worked with them in person we generally got to the point where they were satisfied that we had a pretty good likeness of what they saw.

Janos - Thank you and I agree. I could go a lot further with this. About fifteen years ago when I was recently out of college, that was a central goal of my life. I wanted to help prepare people for the day when these beings were out in the open. I have since concluded that they may never really come into the open, at least not during my lifetime. I also respect anyone who says they don't exist, as there's never been any proof of that. Of course, for the work I'm doing here the question of their objective reality is largely irrelevant. People report seeing them, and there are a lot of commonalities among the descriptions. I'm just interested in visually documenting what people report. I'll get more active with this again some day. In the meantime, I've only got a couple of weeks left before they shut down the servers on Tabula Rasa.